Justin Goodman, playing off of a popular slogan with the same acronym, called it the “Making America Greater for Animals” movement.
Goodman is the senior vice president for advocacy and public policy at the White Coat Waste Project, which opposes the use of animals in scientific research. He previously worked as director of laboratory investigations at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Goodman was commenting in an article about the May 27 announcement by John Phelan, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the U.S. Navy.
“Today, it gives me great pleasure to terminate all Department of the Navy’s testing on cats and dogs, saving taxpayer dollars and ending these inhumane studies,” said Phelan, a major donor to Trump’s campaign who landed the job despite an absence of military experience. “In addition to this termination, I’m directing the Surgeon General of the Navy to conduct a comprehensive review of all medical research programs to ensure they align with ethical guidelines, scientific necessity, and our core values of integrity and readiness.”
In a post on X which included a short video of him making these remarks and signing a document that made it official, Phelan wrote: “I commend @POTUS, @SecDef and @DOGE for bringing this to light.”
Actually, as the folks at White Coat Waste make clear, a lot of people put their shoulder to the wheel to make this happen. “[We] built a ‘strange bedfellows’ coalition for cats and dogs abused by the Navy,” the group declared in a blog post. “We united these MAGA leaders, Rand Paul libertarians, and liberal icons such as Ben Cohen, the legendary Ben & Jerry’s co-founder.”
Indeed, Cohen teamed up with Goodman to pen a February opinion piece for Newsweek identifying some government-funded research projects involving animals that might legitimately count as waste, fraud, and abuse.
Exhibit A, they said, is the more than $10 million spent on constipation experiments on cats at the University of Pittsburgh which the White Coat Waste Project exposed in 2024. These involved sticking marbles up the rear ends of the felines and then electroshocking them into pooping the marbles out. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, in flagging these studies in his annual report on wasteful government spending, cited one permutation in which the university’s researchers “sliced open the backs of male cats to expose their spinal cords then inserted electrodes which fired off electric shocks while the incision was still open to make cats have an erection.”
The Newsweek piece argued that these and other studies involving animals were legitimate targets for Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency. And in fact, DOGE guru Elon did play a critical role in recent efforts to put the kibosh on government-funded research involving animals that groups like the White Coat Waste Project and PETA have long decried as cruel and unnecessary.
Another key player in the decision was influencer Laura Loomer, one of the far right’s shrillest voices. In a May 2 article on her website, Loomer wrote that Trump Administration officials, in a “disturbing betrayal,” had renewed funding for the University of Pittsburgh’s cat experiments, which had been set to end that month. In a post on X that same day, Loomer urged “@elonmusk @PeteHegseth and @realDonaldTrump to investigate this animal abuse and to END ALL FUNDING ASAP.”
Musk promptly responded: “Will ask @DOGE to put an end to animal cruelty.” On May 17, the DOD Rapid Response, an official account within the Department of Defense, issued this reply to Loomer’s post: “This is canceled. All waste at DOD is being removed.”
Ten days later, Phelan issued his ban on the research use of cats and dogs. Loomer posted that his office contacted her to say that it was her advocacy—and White Coat Waste Project’s investigation—that prompted this move.
But it is hardly an isolated case. Across the board, the Trump Administration has been cracking down on federal funding for research involving the use of animals, much to the satisfaction of animal rights activists.
On April 10, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced via a press release that it “is taking a groundbreaking step to advance public health by replacing animal testing in the development of monoclonal-antibody therapies and other drugs with more effective, human-relevant methods.” It said the agency’s current animal testing requirements “will be reduced, refined, or potentially replaced using a range of approaches.”
On April 29, another HHS agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), put out a news release stating that it is “adopting a new initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research.” The release quotes NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, as saying: “For decades, our biomedical research system has relied heavily on animal models. With this initiative, NIH is ushering in a new era of innovation.”
“Champagne corks are popping at PETA,” declared the group’s senior vice president, Kathy Guillermo, in response to the NIH announcement. “This long-overdue reset for U.S. research will open doors to cutting-edge methods that have languished due to a lack of funding. We look forward to ending the caging and tormenting of animals in experiments, which failed to deliver cures for human disease.”
Eric Sandgren, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine who headed the university’s animal research operations for a decade until 2016, downplays the significance of these developments. “There’s nothing new there,” he told me, noting that researchers have long been moving away from the use of animals as other models have become viable. “This just formalizes something that’s happening already.”
Yet Sandgren, a researcher who has used and defended the use of animals in research for decades (he still serves on the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine’s animal care and use committee), nonetheless sees these “aspirational” directives as a positive. “For the last ten years, I’ve been hearing discussions about how [researchers] have to phase out animals,” he says. “And I think that is the way to go. It’s going to spur more people to say, ‘Oh, yeah, we really have to take it seriously.’ ”
In addition to Musk and Loomer, the efforts by White Coat Waste to end federal funding for research involving animals have been embraced by other prominent right-wing voices, including Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, and Trump adviser Roger Stone. But it is not just Republicans who support this cause. Last year, Mace and Representative Jared Moskowitz, Democrat of Florida, introduced a bill in Congress calling an end to nearly all federal funding of research using cats and dogs. The bill, known as the Preventing Animal Abuse and Waste (PAAW) Act, drew bipartisan support and was referred to committee, but did not ever come to a vote.
There is no reason to believe that Trump, who reportedly does not like dogs or cats, cares about the suffering of animals—although he has come out strongly against their being eaten by Haitian immigrants. But cutting funding for experiments that a broad swath of the public and even many researchers see as wasteful does comport with his larger mission to advance his own reputation by saying no to certain kinds of federal spending.
Similarly, some of the opposition to animal research is tied to Republican antipathy to Anthony Fauci, a man they seem to regard as history’s greatest monster. Fauci, in his former role as director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, oversaw controversial experiments that involved the use of animals.
And no doubt some GOP opposition to animal research comes from the desire to oppose something, anything, that gets one in the news. Mace, for instance, is so starved for attention that she ordered her staff to create fake social media accounts to monitor and respond to things said about her online, according to a recent article in Wired.
When I asked Anthony Bellotti, the founder and president of White Coat Waste, about the motivation of the rightwingers who oppose research involving animals, I expected him to say that, like lots of other people, they love their cats and dogs. His actual answer was different: “I don’t know. I don’t care. I mean, animals don’t care about motive. They care about victory.”
Bellotti says he studied political opinion polls that showed there was a gap in support for ending animal testing, with more Democrats than Republicans being in favor, “but it was a closeable gap and a winnable gap.” And so he and Goodman developed an “explicit strategy” of reaching out to Republicans and others on the right. The goal was “to end the culture of losing in the anti-vivisection movement” by “meeting people where they are, not where you want them to be.”
So White Coat Waste reframed the issue as being about wasteful spending, with a strong moral component. The core message: “The government is forcing you to spend money to pay for something you don’t like, don’t need, and don’t want: this reprehensible, immoral animal testing.” The issue, he says, is “not about partisanship. It’s about post-partisanship. It’s pets over partisanship.”
It’s a strategy that appears to be working.